Rushing Woman's Syndrome: The Impact Of A Never-Ending To-Do List And How To Stay Healthy In Today's Busy World

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So where is this stress coming from? The latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics indicates that two-thirds of women with dependent children are in the workplace – whether this be for career aspirations or for financial necessity (or both). Research from the Australian Psychological Society also indicates that regardless of the hours in paid employment, women continue to see themselves as the primary care giver for their children and primarily responsible for household duties. So it would seem that despite the fact that the majority of women with dependent children are working we are continuing to hold on to traditional roles. Our Struggle with Inner Expectation The perceived need to rush is changing the face of women’s health in a detrimental way. From PMS to IBS, from losing our tempers to feeling like we can’t cope.Whether a woman displays it on the outside or keeps it under wraps, more are suffering. Between deadlines and financial responsibilities, school runs and household duties, caring for loved ones of all ages and intimate relationships, our lives can be demanding. We’re often wound up, running ourselves ragged in a daily battle to get things done, feeling as though there’s so much to do, and yet never quite getting on top of things. The term ‘Rushing Woman’s Syndrome’ was coined by Dr Libby Weaver. It evolved out of her observation of women’s health being drastically affected by the constant rush that many women now live in. “Never before have I seen the extent of reproductive system problems that I now see. Women are tired and wired. Sex-hormone based health problems such as polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, infertility, debilitating menopauses and exhaustion have never been greater, and the role of stress in this is undeniable when you look at both the body’s chemistry and the scientific research.” (Weaver, 2011). There is absolutely no way that we are going to talk about New Year’s resolutions. For one, I already talked about it last year, and for the other, I think that if you want something to change (if you want to change something about yourself) you don’t need to have January 1 to come about to begin with your plans.

We rush around and do all we can to make sure that others love and appreciate us, so that we never ever have to feel rejected, ostracised, unlovable, criticised, yelled at, or like we've let others down. When we live on adrenalin we tend not to sleep restoratively. We also constantly cravesugar, because when the body wants to get out of danger, it burns glucose rather than stored body fat. And even though our body is begging for it, we chastise ourselves for succumbing to sweets.Rushing Woman’s Syndromedescribes what is scientifically known as Sympathetic Nervous System Dominance and the biochemical changes this drives in the body (see extended explanations of the science below). I wanted women to understand the significant way stress can impact the chemistry of their body, the many body systems it can affect, and offer them practical solutions to this. It all boiled down to one simple truth that so many of her patients shared: “None of it was a disease; it was just that nothing was working as well as it once did,” Libby says. “What I then realised is that what was basically driving it was the constant and relentless output of stress hormones and that was very, very new to us as a species.” When we make estrogen, it’s got to cling onto an estrogen receptor to exert its effects. Once that unit of estrogen has run out of puff, it is sent to the liver for detoxification. The liver has to change the structure of estrogen before we can excrete it by going to the loo. We’ve made more progress in the workplace than we have in the home. Research shows that if a woman and man both work full time and have one child, she does twice the amount of housework and three times the amount of childcare he does. So essentially, she has three jobs and he has one. It is time for the dawning of new era for women, which means it has to be for our men as well. One of the biggest challenges facing women’s health today is the way stress hormone production is interfering with sex hormone balance. Too many women now suffer with premenstrual syndrome (PMS), PCOS, endometriosis and experience debilitating menopauses, which can have both physical and emotional health consequences.

One word. Actually, that’s two words. Take a deep breath and slow down. Relax and let your body de-stress. For the first half of the cycle, we make a small amount of progesterone from our adrenals glands, walnut sized-glands that sit on top of our kidneys. Progesterone’s job reproductively is to hold the lining of the uterus in place, yet it performs a host of other biological functions aside from those involved in reproduction. So, how can we look to support our thyroid? “When it’s not working, I’ll often use the phrase ‘the road in is the road out,’” Libby says. “The first thing is to find out what’s leading your thyroid to not function at its best.”Progesterone acts as an anti-anxiety agent, an anti-depressant and a diuretic, allowing us to excrete excess fluid. However, our adrenal glands are also where we make our stress hormones from; namely adrenalin and cortisol. As you now know, adrenalin communicates to every cell in your body that your life is in danger, while cortisol says that food is scarce. As your body links progesterone to fertility, the last thing it wants for a woman is to bring a baby into an environment where it perceives she is not safe and that there is no food. The body, therefore believes that it is doing you a great big favour by shutting down the adrenal production of progesterone. Your mood changes before your period, everything annoys you and/or you feel like crying but for no reason. Recently grabbing my attention was a book written by nutritional biochemist Dr. Libby Weaver. What grabbed my attention about this book was its title “Rushing Woman’s Syndrome – The impact of a never ending to-do list on your health”. It is an excellent book that examines how constantly rushing and having a never ending to-do list has a substantial cost to our physical and mental health. One of the hormones driving this is adrenalin, which communicates to every cell in the body that your life is in danger. As I described in my TEDx talk, science suggests humans have been on the planet for between 100,000 and 150,000 years. For the entirety of that history "life or death situation" iswhat adrenalin has meant to the body.

So why do we do it? One reason is because we care so much for the people in our lives. On one level this way of living comes from such a beautiful place. It happens because we have beautiful hearts, but even deeper than that it happens because we made up a story a really long time ago that we aren’t enough the way we are; that we aren’t good enough, tall enough, slim enough, pretty enough, brainy enough, on time enough, that we’re just not enough the way that we are, so we spend our lives trying to please everyone in our realm, putting their needs ahead of our own. We rush around and do all we can to make sure that others love and appreciate us so that we never, ever have to feel rejected, ostracised, unlovable, criticised, yelled at, and like we’ve let others down. An excess of estrogen is what can be responsible for the heaviness and clottiness of periods and it becomes a bit of a vicious circle. A heavy period can mean a lot of blood loss, which means your body is losing a lot of iron – and iron is crucial to keeping the thyroid healthy. The Rushing Woman Syndrome was coined by Australian author, speaker and nutritional biochemist Dr Libby Weaver – and it does sound like an excellent book to get my hands on soon. For too many women, estrogen is dominant (to progesterone) leading into the menstrual period and this is the typical hormonal imbalance that is the basis of PMS – heavy clotty painful periods, swollen tender breasts, and mood swings that can oscillate from intense irritability to immense sadness, sometimes in the same hour and often for reasons that cannot be identified! This can feel like chaos for a woman… and everyone around her.Women get to blame rushing women's syndrome or PTSD or some other hormonal or psychological problem. Men get to shut up and tolerate it or else pay for the divorce and see their life's work get carved up so their ex-wives can "find" themselves in a two bedroom apartment, take trips to Bali with their girlfriends and go in with dates with men they meet on Tinder then complain all the men want of a single mother is sex. Unless you have Wonder Woman’s (or Wolverine’s) powers, then don’t try and imitate the original. This undertaking is bound to fail. You are a unique, graceful and fragile human being (male or female). Park the fertility aspect of what I’ve just said and consider the additional biological impacts of this: we make too little of a hormone that helps us not feel anxious, not have a depressed mood and allows us to efficiently mobilise fluid. If a woman retains fluid, she usually feels “puffy and swollen” and this discomfort can impact the food choices she makes for the rest of the day, the way she speaks to the people she loves the most in the world and intimacy can fly out the window. That’s just the first half of the cycle!